Can Google Beat China? Room for Debate
Experts on the field of information technology weigh in on Google vs China and technology vs censorship.
Can Google Beat China? Room for Debate
Google Stands Up Aginst Chinese Internet Censorship
Over the past year or so the Chinese government has done some outrageous things to censor the internet on their shores, and Google looking to increase its presence in the world’s biggest market has swallowed their bitter regulations at every turn. Until today.
From the Google blog:
In mid-December, we detected a highly sophisticated and targeted attack on our corporate infrastructure originating from China that resulted in the theft of intellectual property from Google. However, it soon became clear that what at first appeared to be solely a security incident—albeit a significant one—was something quite different.
The all-seeing-eye that is Google claims that the goal of the attacks was “accessing the Gmail accounts of Chinese human rights activists.” and they also uncovered more interesting tidbits from their investigation…
“the accounts of dozens of U.S.-, China- and Europe-based Gmail users who are advocates of human rights in China appear to have been routinely accessed by third parties. These accounts have not been accessed through any security breach at Google, but most likely via phishing scams or malware placed on the users’ computers.”
Anyway this has led google to declare that “we are no longer willing to continue censoring our results on Google.cn.” Which basically means that in the next few weeks, unless the Chinese government buckles, Google will lose all legal search presence in China.
I commend Google for its integrity in the face of a major potential economic blow. Check out the link for more information and analysis from the tech gurus over at Ars Technica.
Google Chrome (the best browser ever) Now Has Extensions
Click the link for a nice rundown of their best and brightest features.
Thanks lifehacker!
Google (Finally!) Does its Own Dictionary Definitions
Google used to offer up an automatic definition from sources like Dictionary.com or Answers.com. Now there’s a little blue “definition” link on the right side of any word or phrase search, offering Google’s own homebrew definition answers.
After years searching for the meaning of a variety of terms like life and personal integrity I can finally get the answers from the source I trust most.
[Google Blog via Lifehacker]
Bing adds “visual search” to their Google killing machine
Another punch in the search wars has been thrown:
In an effort to allow search users to go through large volumes of data more quickly, Microsoft on Monday unveiled a new feature on its search engine, Bing, which it calls Visual Search. The feature allows users to browse through images rather than text snippets.
Unlike image search, long a feature of most search engines, which allow users to look for images that match a keyword (Yosemite, Mona Lisa, Madonna), Visual Search is a way to use images for regular Web searches. Type in “movies” in Visual Search, and you will see thumbnails of hundreds of movie posters for current films.
The whole article is a darn good read if you care about who’s going to be the supreme master all internets [Bits Blog@NYT]
Go here If you wanna try Bings visual search for your self.
Google: doin' it big world-wide (except china)
Most would think that Google would be performing best domestically but it’s all-seeing-eye is even stronger overseas:
To be precise, Google accounts for nearly 30 percent of people’s online minutes in Brazil and nearly 29 percent in India. The next country in terms of Google’s dominance is Ireland, where it accounts for 16 percent of online minutes. The global average is 9.4 percent, or slightly higher than in the United States.
If it wasn’t for China’s severe search censorship Google would be #1 there too. [NYT]
